Goethe's Welt/ Welten

The Atkins Goethe Conference

November 7-9, 2024
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX

Hotel Information is available on the Attend page.

Conference Description

Faust declares in the scene “Vor dem Tor” that he has two souls living in his breast, one of which is holding fast to “the world,” “Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust, / Sich an der Welt…” (“The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust, /Onto the world…”), while the other soul wants to fly away. Faust also complains earlier of his desire to know “was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält” (“what holds the core of the world together”). These versions of “world” reflect a kind of materiality, yet also potentially an idealist or spiritual sensibility; they also suggest a sense of the vast cosmos as a scale for the human writ large, or even a political and cosmopolitan perspective on power. The historical context for Goethe’s Faust, however, was the era when explorers, botanists, colonizers, and slave traders were traveling around the world and depicting these experiences in various versions of global travels, as a Reise um die Welt, (Alexander von Humboldt; the Forsters, Adelbert von Chamisso, among others). We find in their accounts wildly different usages of the scalar, spatial, and categorical term “Welt/world,” as well as usages of the term in literary, geographical, philosophical, scientific, social, anthropological, and other discourses inflected by racist, gendered, and colonial views during this era of expansion, travel, industrialization, and increasingly destructive human activities (in environmental terms). How, then, do we contextualize Hegel’s “Weltgeist,” and Schelling’s “objektive Welt,” Goethe’s “Weltliteratur,” or Schiller’s rejection of “Weltgeschichte” in favor of the still broader term, “Universalgeschichte” in his famous 1789 inaugural lecture at the University of Jena in terms of the various meanings of “Welt”/world in this era? Furthermore, how do the categorical designations of Innenwelt, Frauenwelt, Kinderwelt, or Pflanzenwelt pertain to world as a kind of scale in this era at the beginning of the world-changing cultural and environmental practices of the Anthropocene that radically shift global powers and the sense of planetary scale?

The 2024 Atkins conference topic centers arounds concepts of Welt/en-World/s with the questions of how the human (and non-human) relationship to the “world” is portrayed; whether “Welt” is understood to be material or otherwise; and whether it is the world around us as UmWELT, or as cosmopolitan expanse and colonial space for imperialism. On the one hand, such a focus on “Welt” reveals an awareness of the limitations of parochial perspectives and an interest in forging broader networks and understandings; and, on the other hand, “Welt” points to an array of categories plagued by dualisms or racist, sexist, and classist connotations as the Europeans experience or imagine other peoples, other places, other species, and other forms of knowledge. Conceptions of “world/s” might resonate in terms of, or in contrast to, the planet, globalism, nation, continent, “nature,” or realms that designate gender, class, race, psychological states, etc. The GSNA welcomes abstracts that look at the wide array of meanings of (the) world/s, on any scale or for any categories, during Goethe’s lifetime.

Send questions to Heather I. Sullivan, hsulliva@trinity.edu